In recent years, the transportation industry has been moving towards network-centric models using high-end technologies for better business opportunities and greater profit margin by optimizing operations of a fleet of vehicles, monitoring and improving their health status to reduce maintenance cost and providing more value added services to the end customers. Important management operations often include health monitoring of each of the components, their maintenance and repair, and maximizing the efficiency of these vehicles, among other operations. In addition, it is often also desirable to provide timely reporting of information related to the vehicle, such as, mileage, trip information, fluid status, and other parameters, as such real time health information can help to reduce the time that vehicles are at repair facilities. Large vehicle fleet owners often desire optimized capital investment on spares, better up-time of vehicles, faster turnaround time through quicker repair/spares maintenance for higher on-road utilization and ease of maintaining the vehicles by reducing repair costs. In addition, there are increasing needs today to access information faster and at various times and locations.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide methods, systems and computer products to control a fleet of vehicles, for example to further provide for effective maintenance through real-time health monitoring of fleet, optimized routing, operational efficiency and/or optimized capital investment on spares, fuel, manpower, and/or other items. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description of the invention and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the invention.